


The Queen of Swords

by lodessa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-11
Updated: 2006-05-11
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lodessa/pseuds/lodessa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minerva looks at the younger woman and decides to tell the truth instead of the appropriate thing for once in her life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Queen of Swords

Decades of necessary evils and compromises and biting her tongue until she didn’t even want to speak anymore. 

Minerva looks in the mirror and sees no traces of the girl she once was, before Myrtle, before Rubeus, before the war and the one before that and their hollow victory. The grey is starting now, much later than if would have outside the wizarding world, but it’s setting in none the less. Minerva can’t bring herself to stop it either. 

School has started back up and even the first years look like little grown ups, scarred before they’ve even begun to live. Minerva takes points away from a couple of 4th years for fighting in the halls between class, but it feels foolish after everything that’s happened… foolish considering just weeks ago they were fighting for their lives. 

She’s lived her life by rules and ritual, even in times of upheaval, and it’s left her standing after so many great men and women have fallen. Still she wonders where that girl went, the one the sun always shined on. It was hard to believe that the dried up disciplinarian she had become had ever been someone’s sweetheart, could ever have been the object of anyone’s desire. Then again, it is hard to believe that the monstrosity that they’d faced in the last war had ever been the handsome young man with all the right words and an easy smile. 

Sometimes, Minerva wonders if whether things might have been different if she’d only bent for once, if maybe back then it hadn’t been too late to reach him if she’d only tried instead of turning away and hiding behind propriety. 

She’s alive, and that’s supposed to mean she’s won, but she can’t help feeling that maybe they all could have won if she’d played her cards differently. Even if he was rotten to the core, at least she would have known. She should have done it, faced up to the opportunity offered her. Then there never would have been a prophecy and all these deaths wouldn’t have been necessary. 

She’d been afraid though, afraid of the voice inside that had told her she could do these things. So she’d run, feigned apathy until she’d believed herself. Albus had told her that it wasn’t her fault and she couldn’t have known, but he didn’t understand that she had known and that had been the problem. Now he was gone and she’d never be able to tell him the truth. 

When she gets to her office, they are waiting for her. She forces a small smile for these young people, the ones that proved better Gryffindors than she had and had done what she would not. 

The boys leave, she still calls them that even though they have not been boys for a good while, and Hermione remains. Minerva knows she is going to ask for a teaching position that Minerva won’t be able to deny her. 

She wants to tell her to run, to stay far away from the path that Minerva herself has trodden, that staying here won’t heal the wounds… it will only lock her joints up until it’s too late to change her mind. Hermione won’t listen any more than she did though, at least not to pleas for her own sake. 

Minerva looks at the younger woman and decides to tell the truth instead of the appropriate thing for once in her life.


End file.
